[publican-list] sortable lists, esp. glossaries

[Fred Dalrymple]

Hi everyone -- 

Just joined this list, though I've been at Red Hat for a couple of years. I'm a marketing writer in Westford, currently writing the CloudForms Evaluation Guide, and have started using topic tools and publican. 

I understand that we've generally avoided alphabetically sorted lists, e.g., glossaries, in documents because the sort order may change when translated. 

I'm thinking of prototyping a solution that would transform a list into an appropriate alternate order and am interested in any requirements that people might have. For example: 

    • I'm assuming it should work with DocBook 4.5 (at least, that's what I'm using now) -- any other versions or tagsets? 


    • 
what lists, other than glossaries, should be handled by this solution? An obvious possibility is <orderedlist>. 


    • 
is there anything wrong with the general idea of deriving an alternate version of a source file, to reorder designated lists, as long as the original source files are not harmed? I'm leaning toward doing the processing just before formatting so that it would be more independent of edits. 


    • 
are there any constraints on which language the pre-processor is written in? For example, perl is ok? 
How are translations handled? Files are sent out, translated, and returned with markup generally intact (i.e., only content translated)? I see the directory structure in the document tree for each locale. 

A requirement that I'm planning to observe: this approach should not require changes to any content source files. However, new, independent, non-content files could be used to drive the process. The only exception that I can see now is, for example, an <orderedlist> might indicate that it is supposed to be alphabetized by using something like role="alphabetized". 

Comments requested. 

Thanks! 

Fred 
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